do you guys (and gals, don't want to be sexist) actually pay attention to such licensing issues?
Someone correct me if I'm wrong (as I'm not a Debian user), but if I believe the Debian people are ultra-uptight about licensing issues. Ideologically, their goals seem to have the most overlap with the FSF -- they've even taken over the Hurd project.
As a result, all of the core Debian components are free-as-in-speech software. Things like the free-as-in-beer Netscape tend to wind up in a separate category of 'non-free' software.
Maybe they just want to release it for SuSE for debugging so they don't have to worry about compatibility issues with RedHat, Debian, etc.
Which is at odds with the "release early, release often" theory of open source software. It'd be just as easy for them to say, "Don't bother us with bug reports, yet, if you aren't running SuSE." And that would have the bonus that other people who knew what they were doing could start working on FAQs and HOWTOs explaining how to get the translation to play nice with non-SuSE distributions.
It'd be interesting (from an advocacy standpoint, but I admit I wouldn't want to be around when the flames start flying) if people started releasing software under a GPL-like license that had an extra clause prohibiting the software under that license from being included with or used on a SuSE Linux system.
What is more ego gratifiing than a bunch of your peers (or moderators, they're better than the rest of us:) telling us that out comment was good/funny/on-topic? If it wasn't a reward then there wouldn't be people karma-whoring, [...]
At the risk of sounding naively optimistic, I find the greatest ego gratification is when a sincere comment that represents my thoughts on an issue gets recognition (either in the form of positive moderation or in the form of interesting replies, even if those replies disagree with my position). I just don't see the point of recognition for spouting meaningless rhetoric for attention -- there's no thrill from people appreciating the fact that you can parrot the standard party lines.
Personally, I've always pegged rhetoric karma whoring (not to be confused with the gratuitous research karma whoring, which generally does result in some useful links to related pages) as more of a "look at me" ploy, not unlike some of the motivations behind trolling. It doesn't hurt that the karma/moderation system provides a nice high score effect. But appreciation for being called "Insightful", when you know you've just repackaged some standard/. speech? I just don't see it.
All of the high end RMDBS use raw file system access. By not using a "regular" file system, you gain a huge performance jumps.
Which actually has nothing to with the posted article. This article is about creating a virtual filesystem that serves as an interface to the contents of an existing MySQL database (kind of like the/proc filesystem). It doesn't mention anything about creating a special filesystem for MySQL to store its internal data in a more efficient form.
Re:This would only benefit spammers
on
Norway Bans Spam
·
· Score: 2
The spammer would just leach addresses from the list.
One solution, endorsed by CAUCE is to instead rely on a "NO UCE" banner added to the mail server's banner. This has some obvious drawbacks (it's not per-user and requires administrative intervention).
A slightly better solution for an opt-out list (I won't argue the merits of opt-out versus opt-in) would be a list of the MD5 hashes for each email address. The downside would be that this would prevent regular expressions to handle any and all valid variants of an address. One partial fix would be to require that the spammer query a number of variants of a given address. For example, if the address were "erasmus@foobar.invalid", we could require that the query both "erasmus@foobar.invalid" and "@foobar.invalid" for MD5 matches.
A slightly different alternative would be a query-only list maintained by a trusted party. So internally the list might have "erasmus(\+[^@]*)?@foobar\.invalid" but all the spammer would get back would be a "do not spam this address" when they attempt to query "erasmus@foobar.invalid", "erasmus+foo@foobar.invalid", and so forth. The downside is that this requires a central authority that can be trusted with email addresses (not too hard) and is extremely competent with security (much more difficult).
Tell me where the documentation is that explains why copying a URL from Netscape and choosing "Paste" in a term window doesn't do anything.
Using a pretty much stock RH 6.2 install (with whatever updates were available from the RH updates directory), I had no problem copying and pasting between a gnome terminal window and Netscape (4.76, again installed from the RH 6.2 update directory). The process was:
Go to terminal window. Type in a URL. Highlight URL with by dragging across it with left mouse button. Switch to Netscape. Middle-click in URL field to paste. Go to a different site in Netscape. Highlight new URL with left button drag. Switch back to terminal window. Paste with middle button.
However, most of what I do in Linux is done with text consoles. I've never had a problem with gpm copying-and-pasting (I even used it for the quoted text at the top of this posting), other than the issue of text sometimes scrolling while I'm trying to copy it (it'd be nice if gpm auto-scroll locked; hell, it might even be a feature already in it that I've been too lazy to discover). It also uses the same left-drag to select, middle-click to paste as mentioned aboved, which adds some nice continuity for when I occasionally have to switch to X to go to a site that's lynx-unfriendly.
I think he should sue for cost of his equipment if ruined, maybe $1000 for lost data, and a public apology from the police department.
First, I agree that there a numerous BS lawsuits. Second, I think the reporting of this story seems to be lacking a number of details necessary to come to a well-reasoned conclusion.
However, if the police did arrest someone for something that turns out to be a purely civil matter and/or free speech issue, the cost of equipment, $1000 for lost data, and a public apology is a joke. On one hand, the individual arrested was only 19 and probably doesn't have a degree. On the other hand, he did had 7 computers, so we can guess that he probably has at least some experience in the field. We also know that he has the minimum basic skills required to create web pages (or at least run Frontpage). So for the sake of argument, let's say his time is worth at least $20/hour. That means the lost data compensation in question would only account for 50 hours of his time; barely more than a week's work.
Furthermore, while your proposal (inadequitely) covers his losses, it still fails to account for what (under our condition at the beginning that these comments are predecated on gross misconduct by the police) amounts to a severe abuse of power. Failing the punish the Salem PD for such an egregious violation of the basic principles our country was founded on would be a serious mistake -- not so much from a vengeance standpoint, but rather with respect to preventing such incidents from occuring again. If the culpability of the police in such a matter is restricted merely to items they actually lost/broke (ignoring the apology, which is little more than a slap on the wrist -- I could churn out apology letters all day), then they have ZERO incentive to respect civil rights in the future.
That being said, a multi-million dollar suit, which seems to be all the vogue these days, would punish the Salem community and tax payers more heavily than it would punish the police department. Even if the settlement money were to come exclusively from the police department's budget, the result would be a corresponding drop in Salem's police protection. About the only good thing to come of the suit would be that such an extreme judgement would (I hope) serve as a career stopper for the responsible parties.
Ideally, it would be nice if there were a means for wronged parties to generate the career killing side-effect of a multi-million dollar lawsuit, without the unfair repercussions to Salem as a whole. Unfortunately, I don't see such a process becoming likely or popular ("Well, I could try and get the police chief who violated my civil rights fired or I could try and get really rich with a side-effect that the police chief gets fired.").
Re:you won't be seeing any popular authors there!
on
Free Books Online
·
· Score: 2
But realistically, no one can say with a straight face that someone who downloaded a copy of a commercially available work would be likely to go out and purchase a copy.
Been there, done that, got the CD (Me First and the Gimme Gimmes "Have a Ball"). However, let's assume that absolutely no one would be willing to pay for a commercially available work that they could easily get for free online. So suddenly Weber has thousands of people downloading and reading "On Basilisk Station", but not paying him any money. But there's a catch.
There are something like 9 or 10 Honor Harrington novels that Weber's written. Only the first one is available for download. This means that those people who enjoyed "On Basilisk Station" and want more will wander to their local bookstore or amazon.com and start forking over cash. People who, if not for the freely available copy of "On Basilisk Station", might never have located his books in the first place.
It's a win-win situation. Customers get a free book with no obligation. Authors get a means to expand their audience and (hopefully) sell more of their other books.
With an affordable DVD burner, you don't even need DeCSS.
First, that doesn't address the issue of region coding. A byte-for-byte copy of a disk from another region is going to be just as unplayable in a standard, region-based player.
Second, I believe that burned DVDs have a lower capacity than commercially pressed DVDs. According to the first hit on "DVD burner" in google, it appears that the DVD-R specs are just for burning a single-side/single-layer, giving 4.7 gigs of storage. Certainly worth drooling over, but not enough for massive movie piracy.
dropping from 40,000 feet, with zero initial vertical velocity (horizontal velocity can be roughly ignored) then the speed of impact would still only be about 550 mph.
I suspect you goofed somewhere. Here're my calculations (with all the gory details included because I don't trust my memory of physics, either):
Initial equations: d = vi * t + 1/2 * a * t^2 vf = vi + a * t a = g, vi = 0, d = 40k ft
One thing from the first article made my brain tick... 'Completely reversable'. This means you run a program to get it's output. But it also means you can run the program backwards to get the original input.
While I haven't been able to get to the first article (I'm getting a 403 error), I suspect that "completely reversible" doesn't quite mean what you think it means. As another poster pointed out, reversing a "multiply by zero" program would essentially create a magic mind-reader.
What I suspect "completely reversible" means is that the machine can determine all possible input states that produce a given output state. So reversing a "multiply by zero" program would wind up producing all possible numbers that you could've input into the system. Which doesn't sound impressive; however if you consider reversing something else, such as (it's in BASIC, because this seemed like something best illustrated with GOTO's and GOTO's make my brain jump back to BASIC):
10 INPUT A : REM OUR INPUT STATE 20 IF A = 10 THEN GOTO 100 30 A = A * 2 40 GOTO 100 100 PRINT A : REM OUR OUTPUT STATE
So if we run this program backwards with an output of '10', the quantum computer (using the whole quantum non-deterministic magic) would be able to simultaneously step backwards from line 100 to both lines 20 and 40. From line 20, it would continue back to 10 and from line 40 it would continue back to 30, 20, and 10. All of this would occur in the same amount of time it would take to run forward through the code. Finally, you'd wind up with a set of valid input states, one where A = 5 and one where A = 10.
However, standard IANAQuantumPhysicist disclaimers apply. I could be totally off-base with this explaination. But it seems to fit my understanding of the processing magic that quantum computers bring to the table (i.e. being able to do a bunch of simultaneous, parallel computations in linear time).
We use Anonymous Viewing Information to develop reports and analyses about what programs, advertisements, and types of programming our subscribers (as a whole or in subgroups) watch or skip, or for other programming or advertising research.
(For the paranoid, you may opt out of the information collection. However, my personal take on the matter is that something that improves the likelyhood of the shows that I watch staying on the air can't be that bad.)
We may like seeing our egos massaged on tv when they use our stuff, but we're not willing to do our part to say thanks, it seems.
If, by saying thanks, you mean watching a TV show or movie that we would otherwise find boring just because it features Linux, then you are correct.
Is it neat to hear that Linux has made it into a visible role in the entertainment industry? Sure. Is it enough to make me devote an hour of my time every week? Sorry -- I got over the "Whoa! They're using Linux." thrill long ago.
Re:Racists suits using percentages are tricky
on
Racism At Microsoft?
·
· Score: 2
M$ is 20% minorities, but M$ has only 2.6% blacks.
When I interned at Microsoft in the summer of '99, I received a junkmail flyer about the Seattle school system. They had a racial breakdown on the flyer and, if memory serves correctly, blacks only represented 2% of the student population. I admit that my memory's not the best (and I might be misremembering details; it's possible it was a flyer for a private school), but I do remember such a low number sticking out in my mind.
I tried to dig out the appropriate 2000 census figures, but had trouble navigating the census site. I did, however, manage to find some 1990 census figures mentioned in http://www.cityofseattle.net/seattle/spd/stratpln/ ch2.htm, which indicate that blacks represented 10% of the Seattle population a decade ago.
2.6% still strikes me as rather low, but I honestly couldn't tell you how much of that is something Microsoft-specific, how much of that is Seattle-specific, how much of that is the IT field in general, and so forth.
some how I doubt the first exploit to be written for this bug will be targeting linux.
I dunno about that. The scene: A darkened bedroom crammed full of junk. Off to one corner, a lone geek sits in front of a monitor, providing the only illumination in the room.
[Scenario 1] The geek fiddles with a Flash file, fires up Netscape, and watches as Windows blue screens.
[Scenario 2] The geek fiddles with a Flash file, fires up Netscape, and watches as Netscape dumps core.
How many people who know how to exploit a buffer overflow and compromise a system while covering their butt(s) can make a Flash piece that will be perty enough for anyone to check out on a large scale?
Isn't this unnecessary? I'm under the impression that Flash files get loaded automatically once someone already has the plugin. So all that's really necessary is creating a page that people will go to (porn works well) and placing the flash file in question on it.
Or crackers could place the evil flash file on a popular web site in addition to or in lieu of the general vandalism that takes place.
According to the article, they plead guilty to fraud back in December '99. Either it took 12 months for them to get sentenced or there was more to this case than just the fraud. The article implies that the impact their behavior had on several ISPs was a factor (either as a charge that didn't get explicitly mentioned by the article or a contributing factor during sentencing). I'd argue that the article is less than clear on the issue and most likely this was a detail that didn't overly concern the reporter.
Second Sign : NSA releasing information to the public about security
Err, ever hear of the rainbow books? They're a series of standards for classifying trusted computer systems. They were published by the DoD, which is the parent organization for the NSA; the odds are good that there was NSA involvement in the project.
I have to disagree slightly. SmallTalk had some wonderful theory (including "everything is an object" and "code fragments are valid objects"), but the actually implementation was sorely lacking. In fairness, let me qualify my upcoming criticisms with the facts that I'm not sure how much of it was a short-coming of the class I took or the SmallTalk environment I used (Visualworks, IIRC), versus how much of it was due to inherent SmallTalk problems.
Problem #1: Inconsistent object interfaces. One of the killer features of an OO system is that you don't have to worry about your underlying data. If you've got a "print" method, it shouldn't matter if your object is an integer or a string or a boolean (unless you want to print in some non-default manner). However, in the SmallTalk environment I used, the method to print an integer differed from the method to print a string. Couple this with an untyped system and all of a sudden you've got a bunch of hidden run-time gotchas.
Problem #2: The development environment was the interpreter. Whenever I tested my code, it was running within the same interpreter as the IDE that I was using to create that code. On occasion, when things completely blew up, I wound up having to restart the whole mess and load my last saved copy. To make matters worse, since the system didn't autosave, it was possible to shoot yourself in the foot rather severely. I do believe in "save early, save often", but this was just absurdly bad.
Taking someone's car for a spin w/o permission or pirating airwaves on a spectrum allocated to someone else are probably comparable law breaking actions
I'd argue that a closer analogy would be taking a delivery truck for a spin in the middle of the day, while it's full of merchandise that needs to be delivered. Furthermore, that analogy doesn't cover the resulting backlash of spam complaints back to the source. It'd be as if a number of the thousands (millions?) of people that he cut off in traffic all called your business to complain about your reckless driver.
A company giving away it's assets for no monetary gain runs the risk of having it's directors in some severe class action lawsuits, for improperly managing company assets.
Who says there's no gain? Given that a company's directors can usually spend perfectly good cash on advertising, I don't see why they wouldn't be able to do someone similarly as a means of capitalizing on an otherwise worthless asset. If I'm not mistaken, Sierra released 'Betrayal at Krondor' for free right before its sequel came out.
Re:reverse engineering
on
EULA In Games
·
· Score: 2
Can I just work my way down the EULA, point by point, and break each term with impunity because they nullified their own contract? I dunno, IANAL, but it sounds damn nice to me.
I'm also not a lawyer, but it seems that the best you could get would be a nullification of terms that don't have protection outside the contract. It seems copyright laws and similar regulations would still protect your from, say, putting a copy of the program up on a website. However, it's quite possible that reverse-engineering the product would become legal. Or at least it would except for potential DMCA issues.
Slashdot Mirror
Someone correct me if I'm wrong (as I'm not a Debian user), but if I believe the Debian people are ultra-uptight about licensing issues. Ideologically, their goals seem to have the most overlap with the FSF -- they've even taken over the Hurd project.
As a result, all of the core Debian components are free-as-in-speech software. Things like the free-as-in-beer Netscape tend to wind up in a separate category of 'non-free' software.
So yes, there are people out there who care.
Which is at odds with the "release early, release often" theory of open source software. It'd be just as easy for them to say, "Don't bother us with bug reports, yet, if you aren't running SuSE." And that would have the bonus that other people who knew what they were doing could start working on FAQs and HOWTOs explaining how to get the translation to play nice with non-SuSE distributions.
It'd be interesting (from an advocacy standpoint, but I admit I wouldn't want to be around when the flames start flying) if people started releasing software under a GPL-like license that had an extra clause prohibiting the software under that license from being included with or used on a SuSE Linux system.
At the risk of sounding naively optimistic, I find the greatest ego gratification is when a sincere comment that represents my thoughts on an issue gets recognition (either in the form of positive moderation or in the form of interesting replies, even if those replies disagree with my position). I just don't see the point of recognition for spouting meaningless rhetoric for attention -- there's no thrill from people appreciating the fact that you can parrot the standard party lines.
Personally, I've always pegged rhetoric karma whoring (not to be confused with the gratuitous research karma whoring, which generally does result in some useful links to related pages) as more of a "look at me" ploy, not unlike some of the motivations behind trolling. It doesn't hurt that the karma/moderation system provides a nice high score effect. But appreciation for being called "Insightful", when you know you've just repackaged some standard /. speech? I just don't see it.
Which actually has nothing to with the posted article. This article is about creating a virtual filesystem that serves as an interface to the contents of an existing MySQL database (kind of like the /proc filesystem). It doesn't mention anything about creating a special filesystem for MySQL to store its internal data in a more efficient form.
One solution, endorsed by CAUCE is to instead rely on a "NO UCE" banner added to the mail server's banner. This has some obvious drawbacks (it's not per-user and requires administrative intervention).
A slightly better solution for an opt-out list (I won't argue the merits of opt-out versus opt-in) would be a list of the MD5 hashes for each email address. The downside would be that this would prevent regular expressions to handle any and all valid variants of an address. One partial fix would be to require that the spammer query a number of variants of a given address. For example, if the address were "erasmus@foobar.invalid", we could require that the query both "erasmus@foobar.invalid" and "@foobar.invalid" for MD5 matches.
A slightly different alternative would be a query-only list maintained by a trusted party. So internally the list might have "erasmus(\+[^@]*)?@foobar\.invalid" but all the spammer would get back would be a "do not spam this address" when they attempt to query "erasmus@foobar.invalid", "erasmus+foo@foobar.invalid", and so forth. The downside is that this requires a central authority that can be trusted with email addresses (not too hard) and is extremely competent with security (much more difficult).
Using a pretty much stock RH 6.2 install (with whatever updates were available from the RH updates directory), I had no problem copying and pasting between a gnome terminal window and Netscape (4.76, again installed from the RH 6.2 update directory). The process was:
Go to terminal window. Type in a URL.
Highlight URL with by dragging across it with left mouse button.
Switch to Netscape. Middle-click in URL field to paste.
Go to a different site in Netscape. Highlight new URL with left button drag.
Switch back to terminal window. Paste with middle button.
However, most of what I do in Linux is done with text consoles. I've never had a problem with gpm copying-and-pasting (I even used it for the quoted text at the top of this posting), other than the issue of text sometimes scrolling while I'm trying to copy it (it'd be nice if gpm auto-scroll locked; hell, it might even be a feature already in it that I've been too lazy to discover). It also uses the same left-drag to select, middle-click to paste as mentioned aboved, which adds some nice continuity for when I occasionally have to switch to X to go to a site that's lynx-unfriendly.
First, I agree that there a numerous BS lawsuits. Second, I think the reporting of this story seems to be lacking a number of details necessary to come to a well-reasoned conclusion.
However, if the police did arrest someone for something that turns out to be a purely civil matter and/or free speech issue, the cost of equipment, $1000 for lost data, and a public apology is a joke. On one hand, the individual arrested was only 19 and probably doesn't have a degree. On the other hand, he did had 7 computers, so we can guess that he probably has at least some experience in the field. We also know that he has the minimum basic skills required to create web pages (or at least run Frontpage). So for the sake of argument, let's say his time is worth at least $20/hour. That means the lost data compensation in question would only account for 50 hours of his time; barely more than a week's work.
Furthermore, while your proposal (inadequitely) covers his losses, it still fails to account for what (under our condition at the beginning that these comments are predecated on gross misconduct by the police) amounts to a severe abuse of power. Failing the punish the Salem PD for such an egregious violation of the basic principles our country was founded on would be a serious mistake -- not so much from a vengeance standpoint, but rather with respect to preventing such incidents from occuring again. If the culpability of the police in such a matter is restricted merely to items they actually lost/broke (ignoring the apology, which is little more than a slap on the wrist -- I could churn out apology letters all day), then they have ZERO incentive to respect civil rights in the future.
That being said, a multi-million dollar suit, which seems to be all the vogue these days, would punish the Salem community and tax payers more heavily than it would punish the police department. Even if the settlement money were to come exclusively from the police department's budget, the result would be a corresponding drop in Salem's police protection. About the only good thing to come of the suit would be that such an extreme judgement would (I hope) serve as a career stopper for the responsible parties.
Ideally, it would be nice if there were a means for wronged parties to generate the career killing side-effect of a multi-million dollar lawsuit, without the unfair repercussions to Salem as a whole. Unfortunately, I don't see such a process becoming likely or popular ("Well, I could try and get the police chief who violated my civil rights fired or I could try and get really rich with a side-effect that the police chief gets fired.").
Been there, done that, got the CD (Me First and the Gimme Gimmes "Have a Ball"). However, let's assume that absolutely no one would be willing to pay for a commercially available work that they could easily get for free online. So suddenly Weber has thousands of people downloading and reading "On Basilisk Station", but not paying him any money. But there's a catch.
There are something like 9 or 10 Honor Harrington novels that Weber's written. Only the first one is available for download. This means that those people who enjoyed "On Basilisk Station" and want more will wander to their local bookstore or amazon.com and start forking over cash. People who, if not for the freely available copy of "On Basilisk Station", might never have located his books in the first place.
It's a win-win situation. Customers get a free book with no obligation. Authors get a means to expand their audience and (hopefully) sell more of their other books.
First, that doesn't address the issue of region coding. A byte-for-byte copy of a disk from another region is going to be just as unplayable in a standard, region-based player.
Second, I believe that burned DVDs have a lower capacity than commercially pressed DVDs. According to the first hit on "DVD burner" in google, it appears that the DVD-R specs are just for burning a single-side/single-layer, giving 4.7 gigs of storage. Certainly worth drooling over, but not enough for massive movie piracy.
I suspect you goofed somewhere. Here're my calculations (with all the gory details included because I don't trust my memory of physics, either):
Initial equations:
d = vi * t + 1/2 * a * t^2
vf = vi + a * t
a = g, vi = 0, d = 40k ft
t = sqrt(2*d/g)
vf = g*t
vf = g*sqrt(2*d/g)
vf = sqrt(2*d*g)
vf = sqrt(2 * 40000 ft * 32 ft/s^2)
vf = sqrt(2560000 ft^2 / s^2)
vf = 1600 ft/s
1600 ft/s * 1 mile/5280 ft * 3600 s/hr = 1090 mph
So the speed is at least theoretically possible, neglecting air resistance.
While I haven't been able to get to the first article (I'm getting a 403 error), I suspect that "completely reversible" doesn't quite mean what you think it means. As another poster pointed out, reversing a "multiply by zero" program would essentially create a magic mind-reader.
What I suspect "completely reversible" means is that the machine can determine all possible input states that produce a given output state. So reversing a "multiply by zero" program would wind up producing all possible numbers that you could've input into the system. Which doesn't sound impressive; however if you consider reversing something else, such as (it's in BASIC, because this seemed like something best illustrated with GOTO's and GOTO's make my brain jump back to BASIC):
10 INPUT A : REM OUR INPUT STATE
20 IF A = 10 THEN GOTO 100
30 A = A * 2
40 GOTO 100
100 PRINT A : REM OUR OUTPUT STATE
So if we run this program backwards with an output of '10', the quantum computer (using the whole quantum non-deterministic magic) would be able to simultaneously step backwards from line 100 to both lines 20 and 40. From line 20, it would continue back to 10 and from line 40 it would continue back to 30, 20, and 10. All of this would occur in the same amount of time it would take to run forward through the code. Finally, you'd wind up with a set of valid input states, one where A = 5 and one where A = 10.
However, standard IANAQuantumPhysicist disclaimers apply. I could be totally off-base with this explaination. But it seems to fit my understanding of the processing magic that quantum computers bring to the table (i.e. being able to do a bunch of simultaneous, parallel computations in linear time).
From TiVo's Privacy Policy (on page 2):
(For the paranoid, you may opt out of the information collection. However, my personal take on the matter is that something that improves the likelyhood of the shows that I watch staying on the air can't be that bad.)
If, by saying thanks, you mean watching a TV show or movie that we would otherwise find boring just because it features Linux, then you are correct.
Is it neat to hear that Linux has made it into a visible role in the entertainment industry? Sure. Is it enough to make me devote an hour of my time every week? Sorry -- I got over the "Whoa! They're using Linux." thrill long ago.
When I interned at Microsoft in the summer of '99, I received a junkmail flyer about the Seattle school system. They had a racial breakdown on the flyer and, if memory serves correctly, blacks only represented 2% of the student population. I admit that my memory's not the best (and I might be misremembering details; it's possible it was a flyer for a private school), but I do remember such a low number sticking out in my mind.
I tried to dig out the appropriate 2000 census figures, but had trouble navigating the census site. I did, however, manage to find some 1990 census figures mentioned in http://www.cityofseattle.net/seattle/spd/stratpln/ ch2.htm, which indicate that blacks represented 10% of the Seattle population a decade ago.
2.6% still strikes me as rather low, but I honestly couldn't tell you how much of that is something Microsoft-specific, how much of that is Seattle-specific, how much of that is the IT field in general, and so forth.
I dunno about that. The scene: A darkened bedroom crammed full of junk. Off to one corner, a lone geek sits in front of a monitor, providing the only illumination in the room.
[Scenario 1]
The geek fiddles with a Flash file, fires up Netscape, and watches as Windows blue screens.
[Scenario 2]
The geek fiddles with a Flash file, fires up Netscape, and watches as Netscape dumps core.
Isn't this unnecessary? I'm under the impression that Flash files get loaded automatically once someone already has the plugin. So all that's really necessary is creating a page that people will go to (porn works well) and placing the flash file in question on it.
Or crackers could place the evil flash file on a popular web site in addition to or in lieu of the general vandalism that takes place.
According to the article, they plead guilty to fraud back in December '99. Either it took 12 months for them to get sentenced or there was more to this case than just the fraud. The article implies that the impact their behavior had on several ISPs was a factor (either as a charge that didn't get explicitly mentioned by the article or a contributing factor during sentencing). I'd argue that the article is less than clear on the issue and most likely this was a detail that didn't overly concern the reporter.
The first ADVENTURE game with graphics (if my memory serves). And it was Mystery House, not KQ I (which was also ground-breaking in its own way).
It gets even worse: According to the TOS, they can seize your domain name for *any* violation of the TOS.
Err, ever hear of the rainbow books? They're a series of standards for classifying trusted computer systems. They were published by the DoD, which is the parent organization for the NSA; the odds are good that there was NSA involvement in the project.
Now if he were stockpiling Dreamcasts on the other hand...
I have to disagree slightly. SmallTalk had some wonderful theory (including "everything is an object" and "code fragments are valid objects"), but the actually implementation was sorely lacking. In fairness, let me qualify my upcoming criticisms with the facts that I'm not sure how much of it was a short-coming of the class I took or the SmallTalk environment I used (Visualworks, IIRC), versus how much of it was due to inherent SmallTalk problems.
Problem #1: Inconsistent object interfaces. One of the killer features of an OO system is that you don't have to worry about your underlying data. If you've got a "print" method, it shouldn't matter if your object is an integer or a string or a boolean (unless you want to print in some non-default manner). However, in the SmallTalk environment I used, the method to print an integer differed from the method to print a string. Couple this with an untyped system and all of a sudden you've got a bunch of hidden run-time gotchas.
Problem #2: The development environment was the interpreter. Whenever I tested my code, it was running within the same interpreter as the IDE that I was using to create that code. On occasion, when things completely blew up, I wound up having to restart the whole mess and load my last saved copy. To make matters worse, since the system didn't autosave, it was possible to shoot yourself in the foot rather severely. I do believe in "save early, save often", but this was just absurdly bad.
I'd argue that a closer analogy would be taking a delivery truck for a spin in the middle of the day, while it's full of merchandise that needs to be delivered. Furthermore, that analogy doesn't cover the resulting backlash of spam complaints back to the source. It'd be as if a number of the thousands (millions?) of people that he cut off in traffic all called your business to complain about your reckless driver.
Who says there's no gain? Given that a company's directors can usually spend perfectly good cash on advertising, I don't see why they wouldn't be able to do someone similarly as a means of capitalizing on an otherwise worthless asset. If I'm not mistaken, Sierra released 'Betrayal at Krondor' for free right before its sequel came out.
I'm also not a lawyer, but it seems that the best you could get would be a nullification of terms that don't have protection outside the contract. It seems copyright laws and similar regulations would still protect your from, say, putting a copy of the program up on a website. However, it's quite possible that reverse-engineering the product would become legal. Or at least it would except for potential DMCA issues.